A DISCOURSE BASED STUDY ON THEME IN KOREAN AND TEXTUAL MEANING IN TRANSLATION

Most linguistic communities have textual resources for organizing experiences into coherent text. The way that the resources are used may not be the same but vary from one language to another. This variation can be a source of translation difficulty in rendering a natural-reading translation. This thesis investigates the question of how the choices of Theme, which is one of the main textual resources, have an impact on textual meaning in translation between English and Korean. The premise underlying the study is that a translation that is not inaccurate in lexical choices may still read as unnatural to the target readers if a careful consideration is not given to Theme choices at the clause level and Thematic development at the text level in the source and target texts. This assumption is derived from systemic functional linguistic (SFL) theory, which postulates that Theme at the clause level plays a critical role in constructing a text into a coherent linear whole at the text level. This brings in another equally important question of the study: how Theme works in Korean. No research has been done to investigate th